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The Last Day of the Guarantee

A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

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Beautiful Numbness: The Book I Have Been Writing for Fifty Years

Every book has a birthday, but not every book has a conception date. Some books arrive late and fast, fully formed, demanding to be transcribed before they vanish. The Last Living American White Male was like that. Others accumulate across decades, assembling themselves in the background of a life, borrowing material from every stage and every failure and every standing ovation until the writer finally sits down and discovers that the book has already been written in the margins of everything else. Beautiful Numbness: Art, Sedation, and Twenty-Five Centuries of the Standing Ovation is that kind of book. It was conceived when I was ten years old. It has taken me more than half a century to deliver it. It is now available as a Kindle ebook, a paperback, and a free PDF download from David Boles Books.

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Return to the Braided Prairie: A 2024 North Loup Photo Memory

When I returned to North Loup, Nebraska this summer to bury my mother, I realized I hadn’t been back to that beautiful village for 40 years! It seemed impossible that I’d been away from the braided prairie for two generations! I discovered the last time I visited North Loup was in 1984 when I published a photo memory. Today, 14,600 days later, I present a new photo memory of the North Loup that raised me, and that lifted all the hopes of my curious childhood in far away in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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The Scotia Register Wormhole

It isn’t often you can take a trip through a wormhole, and survive, tumbling back in time, from whence you began, and then arrive back in the future from which there is no escape; and so I have described my recent journey tripping through the online archives of — The Scotia Register — a village newspaper that was published weekly, on Thursdays, in Scotia, Nebraska (population 291) from 1895 to 2003. Paging back through The Scotia Register archives was like being watched and recorded, from afar, years ago, with the perspective, and perception, of the now.

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The Magic of Electronic Prescriptions

I was recently introduced to the magic of “Electronic Prescriptions” or “E-Prescribing” — or “E-Rx” if you prefer the funky — when I last visited my doctor for a 90-day refill of Benicar for $50.00USD:

Although e-prescribing is technically regarded “optional,” you could face payment penalties starting in 2012 if you are capable of participating and decided not to do so in 2011. This is as per a Dec. 13 PQRI National Provider Call sponsored by CMS.

Between 2012 and 2014, the payment adjustment will start for practices that are unsuccessful e-prescribers. Eligible professionals who don’t e-prescribe in 2011 could collect one percent less than the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule amount in 2012, and that pay cut will go up to 1.5 percent in 2013 and two percent in 2014, said CMS’s Daniel Green, MD, during the call.

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Always Confess. Unless, of Course, You Should Lie!

If you do something wrong, confess.  Don’t prevaricate.  Don’t excuse.  Above all, don’t lie!  The truth forms you as a human being.

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Mourning Lane Drug

by Michael L. Goetting, R.Ph.

As a former Rite Aid employee, I can vouch that Rite Aid is an evil force in my humble opinion. However, the anecdotal tales in the Go Inside article could have happened at poorly run outlet at any chain store. Rude employees are a danger in any business, and the ongoing labor shortage in the Pharmacy sector magnifies this problem. I could even attempt to explain the pricing on the antihistamine product, but the purpose is not to defend Rite Aid. The fact remains that these events did occur in Rite Aid stores.

This story reflects the real problem at Rite Aid.

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